Quote I know that my computer is a little under powered for video editing, but I'd like to know if my experience is normal/expected.

I have an i7, 8GB Ram, and Intel Video. When rendering 4k video in the "Produce" tab, it taskes a very long time. For example, i just created a 19 second video that took 32 minutes to render.

Is there anything in can do (besides buy a new computer) to help improve the performance?

Lots of things!

For starters, it would help to know what format your source clip is and what format you're trying to produce to. You can take a screenshot of the Produce settings and attach it to your reply using this button:



If you're willing to share a short sample clip, you can also attach it, but if it's over 5MB in size, you should upload it to the cloud and paste a link so other people can download it and see the critical format details. Otherwise, you can download the free MediaInfo app and save and attach the clip's internal details, or take another screenshot and attach that too.

While you're at it, please follow the instructions in the Read Me Before Posting sticky thread at the very top of the PD17 forum se we can see if there are any obvious issues with your computer, like outdated/wrong drivers.

Thank you for your reply and help.

I've attached the DxDiag.

The video I am working with is:

MPEG-4, H.265 HEVC, 99.9 Mb/sec, 3840x2160 at 29.97 fps.

The orginal video is 33.9 seconds long and 405MB. I editied it down to 19 seconds. In the "Produce" tab, I selected the "Default" profile type, and "MPEG-4 4K 3840x2160/30p (37Mbps)". Country/Video is NTSC.

I checked the "Fast Video Rendering Technology" box, and the "Intel Quick Sync Video" option (only one available).

Also, in the Preferences - Hardware Acceleration page, I checked the "Enable OpenCL technology..." box. I also ran the Optimize proess on this page. This seems to have reduced the time to render this 19 second video from 31 minutes to about 16.

I also tried reducing the bitrate to 35Mb/sec and the frame rate to 24. This took another minute or two off of the render time. I tried rendering to H.264 with 50Mb/sec, and this took about 22 minutes to render.

As a side note, if I don't make any edits/enhancements to the video, it renders in about 30 seconds. I guess this makes sense tho...

I am using PowerDirectory 17.0.2314.1, Version Type 365.

Thank you for your help
-M

Thanks for all the details.

On the producing side, it looks like you're doing everything right, but one missing detail is what other edits have you done besides simply trimming the clip?

You mention "As a side note, if I don't make any edits/enhancements to the video, it renders in about 30 seconds." Can you please state what other kinds of edits you've done? Some can be quite computation-intensive and might actually run faster with different output choices.

The main thing I noticed from your DxDiag results is that while you have the 2018 October update for Win10 installed, your Intel HD 620 driver is 11 months old. You can try opening up Device Manager, double-click on the HD 620 and click on the Update Driver button to see if Windows Update will find something newer, or you can go directly to this Intel page to get the most recent driver (released 2 weeks ago).

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Thanks for the suggestion - i will look into updating the driver and reply if that makes a difference or not.

I tried a few rendering tests with the same video:

I imported the video, then went straight to the Produce tab and rendered with the settings listed above. As i mentioned, this took about 30 seconds to render the 33 second clip.

On another test, I trimmed about 8 seconds off the beginning, and about 6 seconds off the end. I also made several changes in the Fix / Enhance page, including WB, Denoise, HDR Effect and Color Adjustment. This is the one that took about 16 minutes at 100Mb/sec and 14 minutes at 35Mb/sec

For my first attempt with this clip, did the same trimming, but did the color grading in Color Director. This took 32 minutes to render the 19 second clip, but for this try, I did not have the "Enable OpenCL" option checked.

I will update the VGA Drivers, and try another clip on ColorDirector and reply with my results.

Thanks
-M

Quote ...
On another test, I trimmed about 8 seconds off the beginning, and about 6 seconds off the end. I also made several changes in the Fix / Enhance page, including WB, Denoise, HDR Effect and Color Adjustment. This is the one that took about 16 minutes at 100Mb/sec and 14 minutes at 35Mb/sec

For my first attempt with this clip, did the same trimming, but did the color grading in Color Director. This took 32 minutes to render the 19 second clip, but for this try, I did not have the "Enable OpenCL" option checked.

I will update the VGA Drivers, and try another clip on ColorDirector and reply with my results.

Thanks
-M

Yes, several of those corrections need lots of processing to accomplish. Once you have the newest video driver installed, you should see a noticeable improvement in producing especially to H.265, and possibly also to H.264.

You might also try breaking up the processing into a couple of steps. If you only did the WB and CA up front, that should produce very quickly and you may find that doing the HDR and Denoise on their own will take less time collectively than doing them all at once. Experimenting here will give you some good data on where the slowdown is occurring, and will help you plan your workflow on future projects.

Well that was a fail. I downloaded the installer from Intel, and it says that the driver is not appropriate for my computer. The only VGA driver available at lenovo.com is from March of 2017 - almost a year older than the one i've got. It says i can try to download and use the ZIP file, but i'm not sure if this is actually a good idea, and i can't seem to actually find the download link for the ZIP file.

Quote Well that was a fail. I downloaded the installer from Intel, and it says that the driver is not appropriate for my computer. The only VGA driver available at lenovo.com is from March of 2017 - almost a year older than the one i've got. It says i can try to download and use the ZIP file, but i'm not sure if this is actually a good idea, and i can't seem to actually find the download link for the ZIP file.

Here are two options: First try the looking for the "official" version of the latest driver by entering your laptop's serial number here at the Lenovo site.

The other way is to directly download the Intel driver (which is the installer .exe file, not a ZIP file) from here.

If you're uncertain about installing the Intel driver, make a system backup so you have a known state to restore your system to.

You can also go to the Apps & Features tool and uninstall the Intel driver if you think it's causing any problems. The Intel release notes state that you should NOT use Roll Back Driver from Device Manger to uninstall this update, so just uninstall it like you would any other program.

That is the page I used for Lenovo. The only VGA drive filie to download is from March 2017.

That is the file i downloaded from Intel (.EXE). When I run the installer, I get the attached message.

After re-reading the info in Intel's website, the ZIP file for manual install is not available for this release. I'm sure if there is a way to force the new driver in, but i'm thinking that wouldn't be a good idea anyway.

Ok - I got the driver updated by extracting the EXE file, and manually updating the driver from the Device Manager. The driver update was successful, but the Intel Control panel no longer works. I never really used it anyway, but we'll see what that means in the long run.

So i have the driver dated 12/10/2018. I will try to re-process the video and let you know if there is any difference.

Thanks
-M

With the updated driver, some of the PD preferences have changed. When I first launched PD17 after the update, I was prompted to Optimize my GPU Hardware Acceleration, which I did.

There is no longer an "Enable OpenCL Technology..." option.

In Preferences - Hardware Acceleration, the option "Enable Intel Effects Acceleration...." option is grayed out and cannot be checked

When rendering to H.265, the "Fast Video Rendering Technology" option is grayed out and cannot be checked. This option is available when I select H.264.

Using the same 19 second clip, and applying the same fixes and enhancements, I the fastest render time was about 13 minutes. Using various combinations of codecs, bitrates and options, the render time varied from 13 to 16 minutes.

After the VGA driver update, it seems like about a minute was cut off of the render time. An improvement, but certainly not blazing fast.

I am considering rolling back to the previous driver (dated 2/2018), since the new one is not really supported on my laptop and it doesn't seem like i've gained very much.

Thanks for your replies and help.

Ok. Try one of the Intel drivers that worked for the person in this post or the one directly below it. Just remember to uninstall the latest driver first (as described in my earlier post)!

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

I was able to get the Intel drivers from 11/5/2018 installed using the EXE downloaded directly from Intel. I didn't get any warnings, and the control panel and everything else is working normally. I also made some adjustments to the power settings.

With all that, I got my 19 second video to render in 9 and a half minutes. This is down from about 15, so a significant improvement. Rendering a 10 minute video would definitly be a bummer. I guess i'll have to stick to short clips in 4K and use 1080 for longer videos. Not sure if there is anything else I can do to improve the situation.

I'm curious as to what kind of Render times other people are getting with PD17, and what the hardware specs are.

Thanks for all your help

-M

I'm really glad to hear the you got the driver installed, and that you're now able to produce your clip 40%+ faster. Nice job!

For longer vids, you may want to produce to H.264 as that should be much faster than H.265.

If you want other people to test out your project, you can use File, Pack Project Materials.. Send it to a cloud folder, then when you post the link here, anyone with PD17 can download and run the project with the exact edits and let you know how long it took to produce.

I have both an Intel UHD 630 iGPU and an nVidia RTX 2070 and I'd be interested in seeing the difference between them, and also between H.264 and H.265

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

I've uploaded the project to the CyberLink Cloud:

https://uscloud01.powercloud.cyberlink.com/share/project/c90cf632-19b1-40d3-b498-238560b7a7df. It is about 400MB

Thanks for sharing the project! I ran a few tests on it, but first I want you to have a clear understanding of the differences between our two computers.

This chart shows the power benchmarks for your laptop's i7-7500U CPU and my brand new desktop's i9-9900K, which was built specifically for video editing. The 3rd column is the CPU I had for 5 years (also built for video work), and I included that because you can see the clear trend here in terms of computing power vs. the number of cores each CPU has.

All technicalities aside, the basic rule here is that your CPU has 2 cores, my 5-year old 4770K had 4 and my new one has 8, and the benchmarks of each one essentially double when the # of cores double. So if everything else is equal, I'd expect my new system to be able to produce your exact project about 4x faster than yours, which would be somewhere around 2:20.

In reality, my system isn't that fast. In fact, it's closer to only a 2x improvement, which tells me that your system is probably working as fast as is realistically possible.

I tried producing the clip to H.265 and H.264 using 3 different output selections, CPU-only, nVidia RTX 2070 and the UHD 630 iGPU built-in to my processor, just like your HD 620 is on your laptop. I used Profile Analyzer to create the best-matched H.265 profile (4k 30p 100Mbps) and a standard H.264 one (4k 30p 50Mbps). Here's what I found:

Format	Device	Time	Size
H.265	CPU-only	5:10	248MB
H.265	UHD 630	4:11	241MB
H.265	RTX 2070	3:57	244MB
H.264	CPU-only	4:02	122MB
H.264	UHD 630	4:07	118MB
H.264	RTX 2070	3:57	120MB

On your system, using the iGPU (Intel QuickSync) option is probably the best choice when working with H.265, but somewhat suprisingly, you may get slightly better performance if you uncheck that box and only use your CPU when producing to H.264.

As I wrote earlier, you may find it faster to separate the corrections into 1 or two groups before producing, but only experimenting will tell you if that's worth the extra steps.

If and when you get to a 10 minute video, I think you should plan to just let it run overnight when you're ready to produce it...

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

When you add these Fix/Enhance features as in this test they are bound by CPU load in preparing the frame for encoding. Encode time really becomes secondary, hence the results as optodata's table. All H.264 cases are CPU bound preparing the frame for encoding so it really does not matter what does the encoding (CPU, iGPU, dGPU) basically the times are all constant as the performance is governed by the CPU doing the frame preparation.

The same is true for the H.265 cases. Even though the H.265 encode is much more taxing than H.264, the times are very similar to H.264, because again, the long pole in the tent is Fix/Enhance CPU frame preparation for the encoder. His CPU H.265 encode is a little slower as now you've further loaded the CPU to do not only the frame prep, but also the encode. So you've got less CPU cycles performing frame prep, hence the slowup.

So in this particular case, with these types of CPU load enhancements done to a video, putting a high end dGPU in a CPU throttled box from frame preparation offers little encode performance improvements. However, the dGPU will be very impressive in a simple H.265 transcode task. So again, you'll get a very wide range of results, even for people that have identical dGPU's. Hence my often-recommended statement of putting as much funding into the CPU as practical for each user’s situation. That will always help in virtually ever editing task, how much an iGPU, dGPU can assist is very dependent on users unique timelines.

My 4 yr old platform with dGPU 1070 encoding pic attached for H.265 profile case, time 2:39. There is no H.264 (4k 30p 37Mbps) standard profile. The 37Mbps is a H.265 profile as ideally one gets similar quality of H.264 but at the lower bitrate, so H.264 default would be 50Mbps.

Hopefully the RTX dGPU will get a boost when Nvidia releases native Turing encoder support and it's adapted by CL.

Jeff

Thanks to everyone for all this information. This is really helpful in guaging what to expect from a latptop trying to do all this work. I am experienced in IT, but new to video editing. This all helps understand where the workload is and why certain processes might take shorter/longer than might be initally expected. My overall user experience with PD17 is good - not a lot of lagging during editing and decent performance/playback during editing. If my sacrifice is a long Produce/Render time, then so be it. At least I know what to expecct.

Anyway, a bigger problem I will have is learning the art of color grading to make video really look great.

thanks again for all the info and help.
-M

I don't understand optodata's file sizes. Shouldn't the h.265 videos be about half the size of the h.264? Looks like it's the other way around in his chart.

Quote I don't understand optodata's file sizes. Shouldn't the h.265 videos be about half the size of the h.264? Looks like it's the other way around in his chart.

No, the H.265 are ~100Mbps and the H.264 are ~50Mbps, he modified his posted and corrected the previous H.264, 37Mbps specification error. So they are as expected, the H.265 should be about 2X the size of H.264 which they are.

Jeff